The backlist boom which surged during the pandemic continued with a mighty push from TikTok in 2022, as nearly two-thirds (£1.19bn) of Nielsen BookScan revenue last year came from editions published in 2021. This is the second-highest share of revenue for a TCM 12-month period coming from titles released prior to the beginning of that year.
Links of the week January 30 2023 (05)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
30 January 2023
That is a significant jump on backlist-heavy 2021 (62%) and is in line with 2020's 67%, though both years are missing a significant amount of data owing to pandemic blackouts.
But the trend completely upends sales patterns for much of the past 20 frontlist-heavy years. Take 2007, which at £1.79bn was the previous official BookScan all-time high: in that year, 53% of sales came from titles published in 2006 or earlier.
And yes, even in those years, a majority of sales were still older titles-albeit a slim majority. The change is where the sales were coming from...
For the first time since 2019, Nielsen was able to report data for the full year-and it seems most publishers have been reaping the reward of a bountiful few years, with a number posting all-time highs.
Measuring publisher performance with a complete 52-week deck of a Nielsen BookScan year for the first time since 2019 shows how fruitful the pandemic and the immediate post-pandemic era has been. In official annual returns through BookScan's Total Consumer Market, four of the top five publishers had their best value totals in at least a decade, while nine of the UK's top 20 had their biggest years since records began.
HarperCollins, which laid off a "small number" of workers last fall, is taking more drastic steps to reduce its workforce, and plans to cut 5% of its employees in North America by the end of the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. Some jobs were eliminated today.
In a memo to employees, HC CEO Brian Murray wrote that the sales surge the industry and HarperCollins experienced during the pandemic has "slowed significantly as of late." He pointed to problems at Amazon as the primary factor behind declines in sales and earnings in the quarter ended September 30, but noted that a hoped-for rebound has not occurred in the current quarter: "we must pause to recognize the depth of the core issues we currently face," he wrote, at what he described as "what he called "a critical juncture for the organization."
A decade ago fiction was said to be migrating to digital-but in 2022 adult fiction sales were £164m greater than its 2014 low, propelling the market to a strong total in the past 12 months.
Officially, the year just gone has been the greatest sales haul for the British book trade since records began, led by Fiction's biggest 12-month period in history. Just over £1.81bn was earned through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market (TCM) in 2022, beating 2007's £1.797bn. A little more than 209.1 million books were rung through the tills, officially a unit-sales 11-year high.
Booksellers report that more customers are switching to paperbacks as household budgets tighten, with agents and publishers also predicting a shift towards the cheaper format. Most agree, however, that hardbacks will endure due to the opportunities presented by special editions and a "two bites of the cherry" approach to publishing where a hardback is published first, followed by a paperback, usually a year later.
Nick Webb, co-owner of The Rabbit Hole in Brigg, Lincolnshire, regularly has customers who say they will wait for the paperback because many cannot justify the cost of a new hardback. He told The Bookseller: "Many people who are drawn to question whether we have a particular title in will ultimately say they will wait for the paperback, especially if it's by an untested debut author. And in the interim, they will very often pick up a copy cheaply at a charity shop or borrow a copy from a friend. All of these demonstrate lost sales to ourselves, the publisher, and ultimately the author."
He said that as an indie bookshop, the continuing preference to publish titles in hardback is an ongoing and concerning issue considering both the current economic climate and the evolving demands of customers. "While customers may be willing to outlay the price of a hardback for a favourite author or as a special gift, the current state of the economy means that price is increasingly prohibitive," he explained.
I write a historical fiction series set in World War Two London. My protagonist is a Scotland Yard detective called Frank Merlin. I place great importance on being historically accurate in my books. I take the view that as I am attempting to transport my readers to a very different time and place, accuracy is a key element to doing that successfully. I am very aware that words like ‘atmospheric' and ‘authentic' are among the most commonly used in positive reviews of historical fiction. However, it cannot be denied that there are many books, films and plays that are historically inaccurate but still regarded as successful. Why? And does it really matter?
In this internet age there is little reason not to get basic historical facts right. In the case of my period, wartime Britain, there is a vast amount of historical information available online as well as a voluminous literature. I can draw on numerous superb histories, biographies, autobiographies and diaries. Very helpful portrayals of the period are also contained in the fictional works of authors like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen.
I write dark fantasy stories for adults that explore survival after sexual trauma and war. My work focuses on the aftermath of sexual violence and the way my protagonists stubbornly live well after the unthinkable. There are no on-page depictions of SA in my work. Naturally, edits are a must and I am very receptive to feedback (I'm in journalism, so tough deletions and red pens are familiar friends of mine).
As a debut writer who was previously represented by a literary agent, I made structural, style, and developmental edits to my manuscript on the guidance of my agent. I wanted to ask how an agent's edits differ from those of a publishing house's editor?
Since I work as a newspaper editor, I often have strong opinions about what accessible writing looks like. Should I stand my ground with regard to edits (professionally, of course) or is it best for unpublished authors to trust the expertise of their agents and editors? Especially when it comes to issues such as sexual violence, racism, or war, I am very firm that my work shouldn't be edited purely for the sake of "good taste" or "finding the book a home" in the commercial market. How can a debut writer navigate this challenge?
"Why isn't there more sex in your books?" I get this question a lot. In my DMs. In my email. In Zoom book club meetings, bookstore signings, and festival events. This, more than any other, seems to be the question my enthusiastic (and apparently thirsty) fans are burning to ask. Written inquiries are usually punctuated with fire emojis, or more commonly, a string of bright red chili peppers. When voiced by a member of a live audience, they're accompanied by a lot of head nods and laughter.
Don't get me wrong . . . I usually laugh, too. I always open a Q&A by inviting my readers to ask me anything about my process or my books, but as it turns out, the question of sex isn't an easy one to answer. The first time I was grilled about the lack of graphic sex in my books, I was a deer in headlights. I'm pretty sure I had an easier time explaining the birds and the bees to my sons. I scrambled, falling back on genre definitions to qualify my answer: that my books are mysteries with romantic elements rather than romances with mystery elements. That sex isn't an expectation of the mystery genre as it often is in romance.
Everybody wants a good climax, especially when it comes to storytelling. That's why, today, we'll answer the question- what is a story climax? We'll also talk about the types of story climaxes, climaxes versus other story elements, look at some examples, and discuss how to write a compelling story climax. So, let's get started!
What is a story climax?
In literature, the climax is the point of highest tension in a story. The moment when the protagonist makes a crucial decision or faces their greatest challenge. The climax is the most exciting or suspenseful beat. Often followed by the resolution, which ties up loose ends and provides closure.
Readers often remember the climax most vividly after finishing a book, as this is the story beat that leaves the most significant impact. Usually, the climax is the story's turning point, when the protagonist finally defeats the antagonist or overcomes their challenges.
Ultimately, whether or not a climax is successful depends on how well it has been set up by the author and how well it fits with the overall tone and themes of the story. As such, writers must carefully craft their climaxes to ensure that their stories are memorable and enjoyable.
Mystery readers savor the hallmarks of their preferred subgenres of crime fiction. To meet their expectations, the savvy mystery author should choose their words wisely. Authors must deliver the expected violence level, the appropriate sleuth qualifications, the correct level of police involvement, a vibrant setting, a compelling whodunnit, and a satisfying resolution.
Since covering every mystery genre would exceed the limits of this article, cozy mystery will illustrate this premise. Cozy readers want books featuring an amateur sleuth who solves whodunnits. They expect a story where an everyday person strings together clues in such a way that they solve the puzzle.
Both Romance & Sagas and Sci-Fi & Fantasy had banner years, with Romance's £53m its best since 2012, the year of E L James and Fifty Shades, and Sci-Fi & Fantasy's £47m its highest since 2007. Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us was the overall bestseller of the year, with four other Hoover titles in the top 10. Fellow TikTok-boosted authors Ali Hazelwood and Emily Henry joined Hoover at the top. It should be noted here that both Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing were coded as General & Literary Fiction.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy was topped by a genre-jumping Stephen King, whose Fairy Tale became his fastest-selling hardback ever. A new HBO adaptation gave George R R Martin's Fire and Blood a shot in the arm, while TikTok again boosted Olivie Blake's The Atlas Six and R F Kuang's Babel.
In a sense, every detective novel is about the inside of someone's head. What immediately captures the reader at the beginning of a Sherlock Holmes story is the tick-tock of Holmes mind: what brilliance will he conjure next, what detail will he pull out of an ordinary scene, who is this guy?
But we%u2019ll come back to Holmes later, because the character of Tom Mondrian in Watch Me Disappear began to take shape alongside a more modern hero. I discovered one of my favourite series characters in a Majorcan villa when I picked a book off the shelf, curious to know why it was so dog-eared. What was it about this novel that meant it had been read so many times that many of its pages had fallen out and had been artfully Cello taped back to the inner spine? That was when I met the mind of Lee Child, and Jack Reacher. After one chapter I was forced to tell my friends: I will mostly just be reading this today.
When I pitched One Woman's War: A Novel of the Real Miss Moneypenny in October 2020, I had no idea that Operation Mincemeat, a movie about the same subject matter, would be released in early 2022, just a few months before One Woman's War was due out.
Both fictional works are based on a real British Naval Intelligence operation of World War II, where a corpse dressed as a royal marine was left in waters off the coast of Spain. The deceased marine carried papers suggesting that the European invasion would take place via Greece, rather than the true landing point of Sicily. Spoiler: German spies got hold of the documents and Hitler fell for the ruse, diverting troops from Sicily to Greece. Many thousands of Allied lives were saved as a result.
Agents have predicted continued demand in 2023 for feel-good stories as well as a romance and ‘romantasy' boom thanks to TikTok but say there could be a shift this year towards darker, genre-busting and challenging books.
The Bookseller spoke to a number of agents who named books by the likes of Richard Osman (whose latest novel, The Bullet That Missed, was published by Viking in September 2022), Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry, Doubleday) and Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Vintage) as the sorts of uplifting stories readers would want to see more of in 2023.
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: For many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.